Turn-Over Blues...

Today I was told that I would be moved from our web-server dept. (mainly win32 based) onto our DNS server which was ran by a guy who is no longer employed here...and he set up the machine (Red Hat 9) with some sort of boot password or something. No one in our company knows anything about linux. I was chosen because I knew what x-term and a-term and some basic commands were. Basically the machine starts and boots then it comes to a prompt. From here I'm screwed.

I know the kernal vs. and build. BTW its i686. I remember from a while ago that you could use some sort of boot disk (knoppix?) to boot in a get the shadow file. Can anyone help me on this issue? If you guys consider this a gray/black hat matter or fear that someone will misuse this information then please say so disgaurd this thread.

thanks

Once you boot in via Knoppix, you should be able to use the chroot command to switch into the Redhat kernel, and then just passwd root to change the password.

I hate to be a lamer but could you be a tad more detailed?

1/ Boot into Knoppix.
2/ Open up a shell.
3/ chroot <root partition> /bin/bash
4/ env-update; source /etc/profile
5/ passwd root